Wasteland
by leiascully
Summary: Mulder and Scully at the end of the world.


I grow old, he said. I grow old. I will wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

He watched the breakers rime the golden shore with foam and knew she smiled. This poetic whimsy of his was an impulse that had surfaced over the years. He could feel that she looked at him, that the tenderness in her Aegean eyes was tempered with an amused tolerance. All this familiarity with its marvelous dearth of contempt: a credit to her, he thought, her tenacity and the scope of her love. He was still amazed that she loved him.

You'll look foolish with your trousers rolled, she said. You haven't got the ankles for it anymore.

Who is more foolish, the fool or the fool who follows him? he asked, tracking the wheeling gulls.

Mulder, she said reprovingly, you can't go from Eliot to cliché.

I'll make an aesthete of you yet, he said, and kissed the top of her head where the hair was almost all silver now, just a thread of copper here and there as a memento of their youth. His hair was silvered too, blown back off his forehead by a sea breeze that flecked his glasses with salt and a fine spray. He looked down at her with the sun slanting through his eyes, and the glare made her look otherworldly, unreal. Her face was still the slender ivory oval of a Renaissance madonna, the same delicate glow and the wrinkles lately like the crackle of patina to show the truth of her age. He smiled, almost, a spare stripped down expression of a man exhausted. But she understood. Their old litotic habits died hard.

Here we are, she said, and sighed a little, and leaned against him. He put an arm around her shoulders.

Here we are, he agreed, looking at his other hand on the railing of the boardwalk. It was the hand of an old man and he couldn't remember when it had become that way. The hand that had cradled his son's head, briefly, and touched Emily's fevered brow. The hand that had braided Samantha's hair for her on her first day of second grade. Now with no other family and little succor to offer, he touched only Scully. Soon enough his out of place hands with their etched memories would touch nothing.

I didn't know the end of the world would be so peaceful, she said. But I suppose it isn't peaceful in the plague zone.

No, he said.

They had been in the city when the pandemic began, protected from the contagion by their curious hardwon immunity, but the hybrid antibodies did nothing against the violence or the stench of death. The swiftness of the alien retrovirus forestalled panicked exodus for the masses of infected, and the nuclear missiles launched against the massive alien ships had ensure the slow poisoning of the rough-living isolationists. How fitting, he thought, that at the end of the world it was just Mulder and Scully and the spectres of their grief against this picturesque scene of irradiated sea and contaminated breezes.

Pointless, she said, her body a warmth against him. He tried not to think of the accelerated decline of her cells, the failure of her basic components. All the struggle, she went on, I would have kept Will if I knew it would end like this.

He kept silent. His son, somewhere, was either nearly twenty-three or dead. Was he a man his parents would recognize? He thought Scully's son would have stood up and fought to the end of his strenght. The waves washed over the sand and rearranged the jetsam of dying fish. The sun was merry, the light fractured by the chop of waves but gleaming on her precious head. An additional bombardment of energy. Even the old comforts had gone sinister.

There's a boat, she said after a while, gazing down the beach. But you get seasick.

We're dying anyway, he said. If you want to take the boat, we can.

No, she said. We'll take the car and go into the mountains. Even if it's only a few days...at least we'll have them. Her expression was an indeterminate mix of sorrow and exhaustion, her lips crooked in a wry half-smile for the gallows. Funny, she mused, how the urge to live persists in exerting itself even when everyone you ever loved is dead and there's no hope. There's only us.

We're something, he said. Maybe we can thumb a ride from one of those leftover UFOs.

I love you, she said. It was always you. It was always us.

It always will be, he said, and kissed her forehead.


End file.
